Next-Generation Investing: Online Startups and the Future of Financial Advice is the first comprehensive study on the in...
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2 Dear Reader, Corporate Insight is excited to announce the release of our new study, Next-Generation Investing: Online Startups and the Future of Financial Advice. This is the first comprehensive study on the new generation of investing- and personal finance-related startups that have emerged in the wake of the financial crisis. Our goal is to provide readers with a clear understanding of these innovators and the impact they may have on the investment industry. Corporate Insight currently tracks over 100 startups that represent a wide range of new ideas when it comes to advice and investing – from online-only financial advisors to trade mimicking to real estate crowdfunding and more. While many of these startups will inevitably fail, those that succeed could change the very nature of investing, particularly as Generations X and Y begin to accumulate wealth. This study takes a deep dive on each new idea, analyzes how it compares to what established financial institutions offer and examines the potential impact on the investment industry. This extended preview includes teasers for two of the topics that will be discussed in this study – customizable ETFs and algorithm-based investment advice using account aggregation – and profiles Jemstep, Motif Investing and Folio, three leading providers in the online investing space. Next-Generation Investing: Online Startups and the Future of Financial Advice represents the culmination of nearly two years of research led by Corporate Insight’s Grant Easterbrook. Grant is a recognized expert in the field who has been cited in such outlets as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Reuters. We hope you find the excerpts valuable and look forward to discussing the study with you further.
Sincerely, James McGovern Vice President, Consulting Services Department
For additional information or to order the study, please contact Grant Easterbrook at 212-832-2002 x-131 or
[email protected].
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INSIDE… NEXT-GENERATION INVESTING STUDY TABLE OF CONTENTS.....................................1 STUDY EXCERPTS ........................................................................................................3 CUSTOMIZABLE ETFS ........................................................................................................... 3 Drawbacks of Customizable ETFs.......................................................................................... 4 Comparison to the Major Players ........................................................................................... 5 What Impact Will Customizable ETFs Have on the Investment Industry? ............................ 7 ALGORITHM-BASED ADVICE USING ACCOUNT AGGREGATION .............................. 8 How Does Algorithm-Based Advice Work? .......................................................................... 8 Free vs. Paid Algorithm-Based Advice .................................................................................. 9 This New Technology is not Without Drawbacks .................................................................. 9 What Impact will Algorithm-Based Advice have on the Financial Advice Industry? ......... 10 JEMSTEP’S ALGORITHM-BASED ADVICE....................................................................... 11
ABOUT CORPORATE INSIGHT ....................................................................................14 CORPORATE INSIGHT THOUGHT LEADERSHIP ...........................................................15 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ................................................................................................16
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NEXT-GENERATION INVESTING STUDY TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Executive summary About Corporate Insight and our research methodology Background on the driving forces behind this new generation of fintech startups Algorithm/Aggregation-Based Investment Advice Overview Drawbacks Firm profiles Comparison to the existing investment industry Implications for the investment industry Trade Mimicking
Overview How does being a “trade leader” work? Analysis of business models and firm profiles Implications for the investment industry
Low-Cost Online Managed Accounts
Overview The pitfalls of low-cost online managed accounts Firm profiles Comparison to the established industry Implications for the investment industry
Online Search Tools to Find a Financial Advisor
Overview The first approach – a standalone financial advisor search engine The second approach – incorporating a vetted listing of FAs into an existing website The third approach – online matchmaking service Comparison to the established industry Implications for the investment industry
Online-Only Financial Advisors
Overview Firm profiles Implications for the investment industry
Online Financial Planning and Budgeting/Cash Management Tools
Overview Examples of online financial planning tools Implications for the investment industry
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Retirement Plan-Specific Advice
Overview Firm profiles Comparison to the established industry & implications
Customizable ETFs
Overview Drawbacks of customizable ETFs Comparison to the major players What impact will customizable ETFs have on the investment industry?
Real Estate Crowdfunding
Pros of real estate crowdfunding Drawbacks of real estate crowdfunding
Tuition-Financing Startups
The stake in future earnings alternative to student loans Services to help you micro-finance your tuition costs Taking out student loans from alumni What impact will this have?
Tracking “Smart Money” Through Public Records Overview of Other Types of Fintech Startups Broader Implications for the Industry
Common strengths: greater transparency on pricing and lower costs Common strengths: modern and user-friendly online platform, usually including performance tracking Common strengths: emphasis on passive index investing Common weaknesses of investing startups The long-term challenge and the threat to the financial services industry
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STUDY EXCERPTS CUSTOMIZABLE ETFS Firms like Motif Investing and Folio Investing offer customizable ETFs to investors, an interesting alternative to traditional mutual fund and ETF products. In a traditional fund, investors cannot customize the underlying basket of securities. In a Motif or Folio, however, investors own shares of all of the underlying securities (instead of shares of a fund) and can customize the basket based on their preferences. For example, a customer who already has a significant investment in Apple can remove AAPL from the Technology Folio before purchasing the fund. Another significant difference between this kind of customizable ETF and a mainstream ETF is that Motif and Folio do not charge an expense ratio. Motif and Folio allow investors to purchase pre-packaged ETFs or to create their own basket of stocks from scratch. This can include up to 30 different stocks at Motif and up to 100 different stocks at Folio. In terms of differences, Motif’s baskets are a collection of stocks based on an investment theme. Examples of such themes include a Rising Interest Rate Motif, a Too Big to Fail Motif, a Water Shortage Motif and a Tablet Takeover Motif. Folios, on the other hand, are based on more traditional asset class and product definitions – e.g., Small-Cap Blend Folio or Retail REIT Folio.
Motif Investing
Motif recently raised a Series C round of $25 million in venture capital money from an investor group that includes Goldman Sachs. The firm is now developing solutions for advisors and has also launched a service where customers can create their own Motif for retail purchase and get a cut of the commissions it generates.
4 Buying or selling a Motif costs $9.95. Clients pay an additional $4.95 to buy or sell an individual stock in a Motif he or she already owns. User-generated Motifs earn the creator $1 every time someone purchases or rebalances their Motif. Folio is a more established firm, founded in 1999 by Steven Wallman, a former Commissioner of the SEC during the Clinton administration. Several of the startups covered in this study use Folio as their brokerdealer. Folio’s commission structure is relatively unique – the Folio Unlimited Plan ($29/month or $290/year) has no commissions if trades are placed during one of two trading “windows” – at 11:00 am or 2:00 pm EST. Otherwise, market, limit, stop and stop/limit orders are $3. Folio also offers a Basic Plan with $4 window trades; $10 market, limit, stop and stop/limit trades; and a $15 quarterly service fee if the client placed three or fewer trades in the previous quarter.
Mid-Cap Value Folio
Drawbacks of Customizable ETFs In their present form, customizable ETFs suffer from some weaknesses related to the customization process itself. For example, rebalancing a customized ETF is a challenge. If the firm decides to adjust the weightings and rebalance the underlying holdings in a Folio or Motif, there is no effective way to update those clients who have tweaked the standard basket. If Folio Investing decides to adjust the weightings of a particular Folio, clients who hold that Folio are
5 notified via email. Clients can then accept or reject the update to have Folio Investing make the necessary buy/sell trades to bring their Folio in line with the newest Folio allocation. Investors who have customized a Folio must choose between accepting the update and removing their customization or passing on the rebalancing. Customers cannot review the new weightings compared to the previous weightings, making it difficult to maintain a level of customization. Likewise, owners of a Motif will be notified whenever a rebalance update is available and investors can decide if they would like to rebalance. If the client has customized the standard Motif, however, this notification is not provided.
Comparison to the Major Players The concept of a customizable basket of securities is not without precedent. Fidelity introduced basket trading in 2001. The firm lets clients create a custom basket of up to 50 stocks with a minimum investment of $2,000. One major weakness in the Fidelity’s basket trading concept is that each purchase or sale of a security in a basket is treated as an individual transaction and is subject to standard commissions. The firm also does not provide any pre-packaged funds that can be customized.
Fidelity’s Create a New Basket page
TD Ameritrade also offers basket trading via its Portfolio Planner asset allocation tool. Portfolio Planner is designed to help clients buy and sell to keep their portfolio aligned with their desired asset allocation model. It makes the process of placing multiple rebalancing trades more manageable. Users can choose from three options – one of five model allocations (below), create a custom allocation or build a basket of securities.
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TD Ameritrade’s Portfolio Planner’s Five Model Allocation
Using the Build a Basket of Securities option, clients can create a custom basket of stocks, ETFs and mutual funds and assign each a specific allocation.
Portfolio Planner’s Build a Basket of Securities Option
7 Unfortunately, just like Fidelity’s basket trading service, customizable funds are not provided and clients must pay commissions on each security they trade.
What Impact Will Customizable ETFs Have on the Investment Industry? The emergence of the low-cost, customizable ETF is consistent with the longer-term trend of declining transaction costs in the retail investing industry. Many online brokerages now offer free ETF trades from select fund families and/or free trade bundles for opening an account or for transferring a large amount of money into a preexisting account. Firms appear to have accepted the reality of lower commission revenues, at least for the foreseeable future. This explains why many now steer clients to more stable, fee-based advisory products like wrap accounts. Some of the entrepreneurs that we’ve spoken with see customizable ETFs as a big step toward greatly reducing, or even eliminating, expense ratios on investment funds. We don’t see this scenario playing out anytime soon, however. We imagine many brokerage firms will be reluctant to offer customizable ETFs if it risks cannibalizing their managed product or trade commission revenue. This is particularly true for firms that have their own asset management arms. Firms like E*TRADE, Scottrade or TD Ameritrade would have an easier time rolling out such an offering as none of them have their own fund families. They also tend to cater to active/engaged investors, the type who might find such a customizable product intriguing. Given how competitive the major online brokerages are when it comes to offering the latest in trading innovations, it’s not hard to imagine that one of these firms would launch something similar to what Folio and Motif provide in the next few years.
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ALGORITHM-BASED ADVICE USING ACCOUNT AGGREGATION In the eyes of many in the financial services industry, there is still untapped potential for the Internet and automated services to upend the traditional investment advice model. Over the last several years, Corporate Insight has monitored the emergence of a new consumer-facing technology that may be the answer to those predictions – algorithm-based investment advice using account aggregation. While not a widely familiar concept, this technology is gaining momentum. Of all the investing-related startups that Corporate Insight tracks, the algorithm-based advice category has the most impressive numbers for both account growth and financial backing from venture capital firms. Some of these firms have also landed partnerships to plug their tools into the websites of major media outlets such as CNN, Yahoo! Finance and USA Today. More partnership announcements are coming soon. Three firms will launch their B2C algorithm-based advice service soon – Financial Guard later in September, Quovo in late 2013 and NestEgg Wealth in late 2013 or early 2014.
How Does Algorithm-Based Advice Work? This kind of advice relies on aggregating users' outside investment accounts. The big leap forward here is that the best firms in this category use that aggregated information to provide specific buy/sell/hold recommendations for each of the clients’ holdings. Without any human touch, these new services recommend selling funds that are high-cost, poor performing and/or not in line with the users’ investment goals, and suggest better alternatives to buy.
Buy/Sell/Hold Recommendations from FutureAdvisor
9 To be clear, this buy/sell/hold advice focuses on funds; the automated advice won’t tell you to buy specific stocks. Rather, algo-based advice will alert clients if their portfolio has too much exposure to a specific stock or prompt them to sell some stocks and buy into an ETF instead. In addition to the specific buy/sell/hold recommendations, this new kind of automated advice usually includes general guidance on the risks, diversification, asset allocation and/or tax efficiency of a given portfolio.
Free vs. Paid Algorithm-Based Advice FutureAdvisor, Personal Capital and SigFig offer free advice, while services like Financial Guard, Jemstep and Quovo charge a fee. FutureAdvisor and Personal Capital employ a freemium model where they try to upsell users to their paid advisory product, while SigFig makes money from referral fees. Unsurprisingly, paid services require more inputs and provide more sophisticated analysis and advice, incorporating such factors as asset location and capital gains. There are a few examples of how paid services take the algorithm-based advice concept to the next level. Financial Guard’s service detects whether or not a client favors passive or active investments. Their buy/sell/hold recommendations are then customized to focus on either passive or active funds. Quovo has developed technology such as a proprietary PDF statement reader to provide an impressive level of analysis into clients’ investing history and behavior. This technology allows Quovo to analyze what clients have done in the past and identify what has been successful and where they have made investing mistakes. In yet another example, Jemstep’s guidance is optimized for a gradual portfolio transition. Jemstep assumes that clients are not comfortable with selling everything immediately, so the recommendations shift clients over time to minimize fees and avoid capital gains taxes. The unique features of paid firms will be examined in more detail in the study’s firm profiles.
This New Technology is not Without Drawbacks Unfortunately, most algorithm-based advice services do not collect a significant amount of information from users about their financial situation and goals. This leads us to question the validity of the advice being provided. While there’s value in receiving investment recommendations, it would be better if the analysis were based on a truly comprehensive understanding of the client’s financial situation. We believe users would be better served if they were required to input everything from the current value of their spouse’s 401(k) to expected life events, such as sending children off to college. Some firms let users assign their outside investing accounts to a specific goal, e.g., my Charles Schwab brokerage account is for a home purchase or my Fidelity IRA is for retirement. In most cases, however, users cannot assign an investment account to multiple financial goals, or a retirement goal is the only option. Since most investors don’t have their investing goals neatly segmented by account, this limits the effectiveness of their recommendations.
10 It also remains to be seen if investors will be comfortable actually executing all of the buy/sell recommendations generated by a purely automated service. If clients only place a few of the recommended trades at a free service, so be it. If clients don’t place all of the trades at a paid service, however, it creates serious problems. Imagine paying for an advisor but only placing a quarter of the trades he or she recommends; eventually, the value of this advice would be called into question.
What Impact will Algorithm-Based Advice have on the Financial Advice Industry? Two types of investors stand to benefit most from an algorithm-based advice service: those with a complex portfolio spread across several accounts and those who want a second opinion on what their financial advisor is doing. For those who already pay for a traditional in-person financial advisor, using the services of one of these startups will make it easier to hold their advisor accountable. In the past, clients may have simply grumbled to themselves about advisor fees with little recourse for action. Now, these clients can use a service like SigFig to see just how much they’re paying in fees and how much money they’re losing in a high-fee mutual fund compared to a comparable index-based ETF.
SigFig’s Analysis of Load Fees
The do-it-yourself investor without professional advice will gradually discover these free or relatively low-cost services to help them invest. The advice offered will help investors see problems they might otherwise miss if their investment holdings are spread across a number of different accounts and/or institutions.
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JEMSTEP’S ALGORITHM-BASED ADVICE Jemstep’s paid algorithm-based advice offering has been live for several months. According to Jemstep’s President, Simon Roy, the firm has been pleased with their conversion rate for getting paid users to actually place the trades the firm recommends – a good sign, since conversion rates are one of the biggest question marks for these types of firms. The firm has a tiered flat-rate fee structure – it’s free for under $25,000 in assets, and fees range from $17.99/month for $25,000-$150,000 to $69.99/month for $600,000 and over. The advice process begins with users answering a few basic biographical questions, e.g., age, gender, income, expected retirement date, etc. Next, they are asked a risk tolerance question and whether they have any preference on investing in ETFs versus mutual funds, as well as whether they prefer active or passive fund management. The final question probes users regarding whether they presently manage their own retirement portfolio or use (or would be willing to use) a paid financial advisor.
Jemstep’s Your Investment Preferences Questionnaire
12 Users are then given a recommended allocation for their retirement savings. After receiving an allocation, users are presented with a Your Action Plan page with specific instructions for which holdings they should sell and which funds they should replace them with. These recommendations are available either by account or by asset class.
Jemstep’s Your Action Plan Page
An explanation is given for each recommendation. In the example below, clicking on the “Why?” link next to a recommendation to buy a Vanguard REIT opens a flyout image outlining why the user needs more exposure to real estate and why the particular fund Jemstep recommends is the best option.
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Jemstep’s Buy Recommendation Explanations
If clients don’t like the particular fund Jemstep recommends, the firm also lets them choose an alternative fund from a list of options.
Jemstep’s Menu of Alternative Buy Option
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ABOUT CORPORATE INSIGHT Corporate Insight (CI) provides competitive intelligence and user experience research to the nation's leading financial institutions. For over 20 years, Corporate Insight has tracked new developments in the financial services industry through our Monitor research services and custom consulting services. We are known for our detailed, objective research, unmatched expertise, and emphasis on the actual user experience. There are no assumptions in Corporate Insight’s work – we use live accounts at the firms we track to benchmark their effectiveness across all major channels and give our clients unparalleled competitive intelligence. Corporate Insight is continuously tracking and identifying best practices in online banking and investing, insurance, annuities, mobile finance, active trading platforms, social media and other emerging areas. In the process, we have helped our clients -- which cover the entire spectrum of financial services -- to stay on top of industry trends and improve their competitive position. Our research and analysts are frequently cited in financial media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes and SmartMoney and news publications like the Associated Press, New York Times, Newsweek, TIME and USA Today.
CI’S CONSULTING SERVICES Corporate Insight offers a variety of consulting services that are fully customizable to meet the specific needs of our clients. Some of our popular services include:
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For examples of past consulting solutions we have delivered to leading firms across the financial services industry, check out our case studies.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR GRANT EASTERBROOK SENIOR RESEARCH ASSOCIATE CONSULTING SERVICES Grant Easterbrook is a Senior Research Associate at Corporate Insight, a leading provider of competitive intelligence, consulting and user experience research to the financial services industry. Grant joined Corporate Insight’s Consulting Services team in 2011. He leads the firm’s research on investment and personal finance-related startups, monitoring more than 130 firms. Grant has been researching this space for the past two years. He has written three studies on the subject prior to his most recent study, Next-Generation Investing: Online Startups and the Future of Financial Advice. His research has been cited in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Reuters. In addition to his startup-focused research, Grant leads custom engagements for several of the firm’s clients within the financial services industry. These include website audits, industry trend analysis and a variety of strategic consulting projects.
CONTACT GRANT T: 212-832-2002 x-131 E:
[email protected]
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